Buck a leg

The road to becoming a scrap metal millionaire is long, and generally littered with the pocked bodies of desperate junkies. If Vernal Miller, Sr., decides to continue walking down that road, though, he’s going to need a good set of prosthetics, since his first attempt at culling brass off a World War I cannon round took his legs off.

According to Lane County, Oregon, police, Miller had decided the best value from his 1916, Paris-manufactured 37mm round would come from recycling the brass. And so he hunkered down in the back room of his girlfriend’s mobile home and tried to remove the shell’s casing, oblivious to the high explosives stored within. Designed to activate on impact, the relic sprang into action, blasting off Miller’s legs and raising the tally of Americans wounded in the Great War up by one.

Police said Miller had “a number of different pieces” in his possession, but “it didn’t look like there’s any large cache of munitions.” They also warned people not to play with explosives.

The shell’s brass content was estimated to be worth about $2.

by Scott Saxon